The invention concerns a folded box hopper in a packaging machine having a hopper shaft accepting a stack of folded boxes, a transfer device having a gripper for removing the lowermost folded box of the stack from the hopper shaft and an input belt for introducing the folded boxes into the hopper shaft, having a first adjustment device for height adjustment of the gripper and the hopper shaft relative to a downstream transport belt as well as a second adjustment device for the alignment of the hopper shaft relative to the gripper, wherein a height and/or tilt of the input belt can be changed.
During operation of a packaging machine, the initially flat, collapsed folded boxes must be erected and fed to the actual packaging unit. Towards this end, an input belt introduces folded boxes to a hopper shaft, the hopper shaft constituting an intermediate storage instrument and is normally tilted in a diagonally downward direction, the folded boxes being accepted in the hopper shaft in a stacked fashion. The lower side of the hopper shaft is open so that the lowermost folded box of the stack can be accessed and removed from the hopper shaft using a gripper. The gripper is part of a circulating transfer device which simultaneously erects the folded boxes and deposits them on a downstream transport device, normally the so-called folded box chain.
A reliable functioning of the folded box hopper and of the transfer device depends substantially on the precise mutual adjustment of the dimensioning and positioning of the individual components in dependence on the format of the folded box being processed. Since a packaging machine must process folded boxes having differing formats, the relative configuration of the individual components must be adjusted in the event of a format change. Towards this end, prior art has vertically aligned the transfer device together with the hopper shaft relative to the downstream folded box chain and also adjusted the hopper shaft relative to the removal position of the transfer device gripper. In addition, the width of the hopper shaft can be adjusted to the width of the folded-together boxes. Displacement of the transfer device and of the hopper shaft necessitates new positioning of the input belt. This is usually done with a plurality of transmission elements, wherein the input belt can be adjusted in height both at its front end facing the hopper shaft as well as at its rear end and can be shifted towards and away from the hopper shaft. This plurality of adjustment motion at both ends of the input belt is tedious so that a format change consumes a substantial amount of time. Furthermore the structural difficulty associated with the input belt adjustment devices is rather significant and therefore expensive.
It is the underlying purpose of the invention to create a folded box shaft of the above mentioned kind with which the input belt can be adjusted during a format change in a simple and rapid fashion.